Janet Malcolm on truthiness in fiction v nonfiction

In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in "The Golden Bowl" that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is "overreacting" to what she sees. James's is a true report. The facts of imaginative literatures are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist's and the playwright's and the poet's word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer's or the autobiographer's or the historian's or the journalist's. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios -- there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.

from Janet Malcolm, The SIlent Woman (Granta UK 1996), 155

The allure of Ted Hughes' letters, especially in typescript

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm's meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm at one point describes reading some letters that Ted Hughes, who was married to Plath when she killed herself in 1962, wrote in the 1980s to Anne Stevenson, who was then writing a biography of Sylvia Plath. Stevenson Malcolm read the letters during a visit Malcolm paid to Stevenson in England. Earlier, Stevenson had mentioned to Malcolm, as a way of explaining what it was like to be around Hughes, that "One thing you must understand about Ted is that he was and still is an electrically attractive man."

Here's Malcolm reading the letters. It's obviously mostly about Hughes, but it's interesting as well for its sensitivity (in this highly sensitive writer) to the experience of reading letters written in different media — a letter printed from a word processor being in a different media, though the paper be the same, than one typed on an Olivetti.

The letters from Hughes immediately drew me, as if they were the electrically attractive man himself. As I looked at the pages of dense, single-paced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and '60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs. Reading the letter giving Hughes's response to the chapters Anne had sent him of her short biography, I felt my identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer. Other letters of Hughes's that have come my way have had the same effect, and I gather that I am not alone in this reaction; other people have spoken to me with awe of Hughes's letters. Someday, when they are published, critics will wrestle with the question of what gives them their peculiar power, why they are so deeply, mysteriously moving.

Chaos, Clutter, & the Writer’s Challenge | Wired Science | Wired.com

My post at Neuron Culture:

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm structures the book around visits, mostly in and about London, with other writers who have written about Plath and encountered the hazards, both obvious and submerged, that await anyone writing about people live or recently alive. For the end of the book she saves a visit to one of the oddest Plath memoirists: Trevor Thomas, a man of many hats who happened to live in the flat below Plath’s in the last couple of months before she killed herself, and who in 1986 had been coaxed by the Independent to retail his memories of her. He was 79 then and a few years older when Malcolm visited him.

Thomas and a friend, Robbie, pick her up at the tube stop in London, pick up a pizza and some olives for dinner, and drive back to Thomas’s flat. The entire visit is searing, as Malcolm, a writer of incomparable intelligence, fierceness, and compassion, tries to give order to Thomas’s dense, cluttered existence in a house that is much the same way. Toward the end of this passage, which is just short of the end of the book — this is both a biography of biography as well as of Plath, so she’s trying to tie up one just before the other — Malcolm offers this extraordinary passage about the challenge facing any writer. It’s vintage Malcolm and an extraordinary view of the writer’s challenge:

Read the rest of this post »

Lucky Jack. Lucky Dave

A 3d or 4th time through, and better every time. What happiness, to start this again on a fine spring London day.

'Sheet home. Sheet home. Hoist away. Cheerly there, in the foretop, look alive. T'garns'l sheets. Hands to the braces. Belay.'
A gentle push from above heeled the Sophie over, then another and another, each more delightfully urgent until it was on steady thrust; she was under way, and all along her side was a run of living water.

James Salter on skiing

When I skied, or when I thought about skiing, a beautiful skier would stop me in my tracks. He would slide over a lip into a bowl or glade, or drop into a little chute out of bounds. His solid body would become liquid, slipping through the snow, as he found the fall line. I would watch his back and then fly after him, tracking him, fearless and afraid. “What enables you to learn?” Salter asks. “It’s simple: desire.”

In “The Skiing Life,” Salter describes learning to ski from an instructor:

Follow me closely, he says, as if you can, turn where I turn. Trying to do what he does, forgetting some things, remembering others, somehow you follow. The trail is narrowing, you are going faster than you should and farther, beyond your endurance … One morning you awake unaware that, mysteriously, something has changed. This day it comes to you … All day, run after run, filled with an immense, unequaled happiness, and at the end into town together, down the last, easy slopes, and so weary that you fall asleep after supper in your ski clothes, the lights burning throughout the night.

There are of course some who don’t need to learn, some who are almost born with it. Kids who grow up on eastern mountains are at home on ice and cruddy snow, although they dream of powder days. The kids out west have no idea how lucky they are. It is thrilling to watch a child hurtle past. You can see her future: she will slip through bumps, sleep on the floor, hike up mountains to ski down them. She will be powerful and fast. Years later, you will spot her from the chairlift, graceful and unmistakable. Even on my best days, the days when I belonged to the mountains, I would look for that girl. “There is always that lone skier,” Salter writes, “oddly dressed, off to the side past the edge of the run, going down where it is steepest and the snow untouched, in absolute grace, marking each dazzling turn with a brief jab of the pole—there is always him, the skier you cannot be.”

via theparisreview.org

There are about 5 or 6 things I've done in my life —really done, as in spent time ardently learning to do, because they seemed to have the capacity to bring rewards of an extraordinary sort. Skiing is among them.

Article: Nabokov Theory on Polyommatus Blue Butterflies Is Vindicated - NYTimes.com

Nabokov Theory on Polyommatus Blue Butterflies Is Vindicated - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?src=me&ref=homepage

He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.
“It’s really quite a marvel,” said Naomi Pierce of Harvard, a co-author of the paper.

(via Instapaper)

David Dobbs

Article: The Danger of Cosmic Genius - Magazine - The Atlantic

The schism between Freeman and his son, George, began not with any debate about asteroids versus redwoods, but over marijuana. In his early teens, George left his father’s house in Princeton to spend his summers in Northern California, visiting his mother, the mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. He and his mother hiked the Sierra Nevada on Sierra Club trips; in those mountains, and later in Colorado, he came to know my sister, Barbara, a teenage cook for the club. He also hiked the Haight of the late ’60s, when rebellion and cannabis smoke were thickest in that neighborhood, and he made contacts among the flower children. Back home in New Jersey, he became the target of an investigation, suspected by narcotics officers of being the main weed dealer at his high school. His room was raided and some seeds were found. He was handcuffed during class and taken to jail. Freeman chose not to bail him out. In his week behind bars, George read the dictionary up to the letter M before his sister Esther helped spring him. He was shaken by the experience, and his relationship with his father was broken.

(via Instapaper)

That's from The Danger of Cosmic Genius, in The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/

This is a near-epic tale, by the son of David Brower, the great environmentalist, of the conundrum that is Freeman Dyson -- the physics genius who talks idiocy about global warming. Brower wants to answer the obvious but confounding question: How can such a smart man be so stupid about something so important. Usually its a mistake, a forced falsity, to seek the answer to such a question in a clash of an age's great forces within a single mind and family. But Brower, whose own family has been enmeshed with Dyson's for decades, convinces me that's the case here.

This is a stunning, magisterial story. So much that can go wrong in a man, a family, and in science goes wrong here. Messy. Yet it holds the arcing beauty of great physics.

David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

My catch-all first filter for web-worthy offerings and gleanings

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